Lewies Blog

So the rumors from over a year ago, and the Dead Like Me set appearing on Stargate seemed to have added up.

Dead Like Me appeared on Sci-Fi last night. It was a two hour special of the first episode from the first season. I couldn’t set there an watch it over when I played it on my DVR. I tried, but my mind was on other things. If it was a third season, then I would have been into it. I haven’t looked into any rumors on the internet, but hopefully Sci-Fi will start casting the third season.

I went outside of my house in search of sounds.  I have been working on creating a dunking both within SecondLife to help support a fundraising event for the American Cancer Society.  As a member of Caledon, I am supporting our team in the Relay for Life.  This Friday we have a “Jail your friends or Bail them out” event to help raise some funds to support the cause.

looking_for_sound.mp3

The other day I saw an auction up on SL Exchange to be in an interview for an upcomming newspaper in SecondLife called SL Times. Auctions are something on SL Exchange that I hadn’t tried out yet and I figured, Why not?

I kept getting errors every time I tried to bid. I notified the sites support and they had it fixed the next day. Surprising enough, I was the only one to bid and won for only 1000 L$ (about $3 US).

Tonight, Luke Birdbrain interviewed my avatar, Dedric Mauriac. I was at a loss at first for what exactly I wanted the story to be about. I ended up showing him the variouse things that I make in the game. Some of the ideas behind the things and how they come about. He was drooling over a few items such as the Game Clock, Comment Box, and my Message Board.

I was starting to wonder who won the auction. I handed a game clock to him free and also gave him my open-source voice box that I am working on.

So now smaller updates for SecondLife are comming very often. After installing the program, I’m always prompted with this little dialog box asking “Start SecondLife Now?”. Give me a break! It’s not like I don’t eat, sleep, and breathe SecondLife. That’s like asking a fish if they would like to swim. Well, not really. A fish can’t comprehend what you are asking.

So I’m getting a bit low on money this week and my wife asks if she can have some extra cash.  I told her to send 7,000 Lindens my way in SecondLife and I’ll give her a twenty.  I worked it out later in the day that the conversion rate would be at 6,441.

So any how, she got a friend of hers to give her some Lindens and handed them over to me after she discovered that I was seriouse.  So now my extra lindens are up for sale and she has a crisp US $20 bill in her hands.

Blogging … it has pretty much taken a back seat to SecondLife. I’m finding myself becomming more “social” in this game then I ever have been in real life. I’m starting to appear in other peoples shapshots and videos. In fact, I’m starting to apply those skills to real life. Now that’s really odd.

From what I have learned, the most powerful word in this game is “Hello”. Once that word is spoken, people tend to drop what they were doing and start talking with you. I had a group of people just hanging out at my shop after a few minutes. Most of the time, people show up, grab some money from the money tree out front, and leave. “Hello” got me a little party going. Later a few of us went to a museum court yard to see some photos submitted for “7 Days of SecondLife”. We then went inside and saw some really really great photography submissions from RealLife.

In Real Life, Hello isn’t as powerful for passers by. I say hello, and we both go about our way. At least I get a “Hello” back in some form or another. A nod of the head or a smile.

The power went out this evening.  I went for a walk around the neighborhood and power was still out when I got back.  I was clueless as to what to do.  A while later I grabbed my laptop and decided to watch War of the Worlds.  It was one of those movies I got from the Columbia DVD Club because I didn’t tell them that I didn’t want it.  Seems you got to manually opt-out every month.

The movie was put together well in everything except the end of story, or the explination of why the humans won.  There were all these bloody tree roots growing every where.  The alien robots couldn’t operate there force fields with birds flying around.  The ending narrator seemed to make it appear that DNA in our blood was the reason that the aliens all dried up and died.

Well, now that the power is back on after four hours, I’m back to living out the days of my SecondLife.

My wife and I had some really bad service the other night when we went to get some late night toasted subs at WaWa.  Last time, it was three in the morning.  This time it was only eleven at night.  We walked in and we saw our esteemed friend behind the deli counter again.

I wispered to my wife that we could drive on down to the next WaWa and order our subs there.  She decided to give the guy a chance.  After all, his fingernails were no longer purple, and he looked a bit more sober.

She watched as he put some swiss cheese on a sub, then took it off, then laid some mayonaise on thick, then put the cheese on.  He was looking at a screen back and forth to the sandwitch.  Still new I guess.  Another customer came up and asked if it was the roast beef that he ordered. “No, it’s the homestyle roastbeef” was the reply.  Sheesh.  On top of that, the customer complained that he ordered a larger sub.

My wife looked at me and then ran for the door.

On the way to the next WaWa, we passed checkers.  My wife loves checkers.  She went through my wallet and pulled out some singles.  I told her to look again, there is bound to be a twenty in there.  Sure enough, she found it.  We went home happy with nice meaty sandwiches, drinks, and awesome fries.

A little over a year ago, I participated in an acceptance test for an upcomming service called NewsworthyAudio. The service converts news stories to audio. During the test, there were stories read by people, and others read by computers. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a person and a machine. They have software that has many “bits” of a real person speaking that strings those bits together to read out the story.

I bring this up because they sent me an email today regarding there service. They have 5 new free podcasts available in the iTunes library. They are also taking surveys in return for a free week of there service once they go live. If you are interested in what they are about, head on over to register and take the survey. After that, subscribe to the iTunes feed and listen.

I’ve been listening to many audio books on my way into work from the Discworld series. I’m up to book 10. I started looking for more information about the series and discovered that they had a game. Two games in fact. The first was on an old system that I hadn’t heard of, but I was able to download it off of there site and find an emulator and play it in my web browser. The second game came out 10 years ago and runs on the PS one.

I found the game on eBay and won the auction. When it came, I searched up and down all over my house for all of my parts to the PSOne. After an hour of this, I had a running PSOne hooked up to my TV and an enjoyable game on my hands.

The whole thing is setup with puzzles of collecting stuff so far. I run around as Rincewind, fully dressed in wizzards garb with a loyal chest of many tiny feet following me. Many characters from the books are there including cut me own throaght dibbler and the librarian (an ape). The game appears to reference many books this time instead of the first book alone like the first game did. I just hope I don’t get lost understanding the humor of some of the sceens that I haven’t heard about yet.

During my days of growing up with IBM compatible computers, an adventure game was commonly walking around different two dimensional artistic backdrops picking up things laying around and talking to people. These were games like Kings Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, Indianna Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Leisure Suite Larry, Space Quest, Adventures of Willy Beamish, Quest for Glory. Actually, my IBM PC Junior packed away has the first Kings Quest on it.

It’s nice to walk around like this, but also lacking. You don’t feel like you “are” the character, but more of the fact that you are directing the character. 3D has changed all of that. It’s amazing that this kind of 2D game exists for the PSone since most games for it are 3D.